1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technical field of a status notification apparatus, a status notification method and a status notification program, or more in particular to a technical field of a status notification apparatus, a status notification method and a status notification program for notifying the user of the operating conditions, etc. of an information processing apparatus such as an information reproducing apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, the IEEE1394 standard has been widely applied as a standard of a method for connecting an information reproducing apparatus such as a player for reproducing the audio information recorded in an optical disk, for example, and an amplifier unit (an amplifier) for amplifying the reproduced audio information and outputting it to a speaker or the like.
The IEEE1394 standard is officially referred to as “IEEE Std. 1394-1995 IEEE Standard for a High Performance Serial Bus”, which is a standard used when the information reproducing apparatus and the amplifier are connected to each other by a serial bus constituted of a wire.
Next, an outline of the IEEE1394 standard will be explained in general terms. The IEEE1394 standard (hereinafter referred to simply as the serial bus standard) stipulates that a plurality of types of information processing apparatuses (hereinafter referred to simply as nodes) including the information reproducing apparatus and the amplifier described above are connected to each other by a serial bus, and information of a plurality of channels is transmitted between the nodes by time division. Hereat, according to this serial bus standard, a maximum of 63 different channels can be used for information transmission within the same series connected by a series of serial bus systems which do not include any branches.
Also, according to the serial bus standard, the information from the nodes is transmitted collectively in units called the isochronous cycle (where “cycle” indicates one cycle formed by time division on the serial bus). The isochronous cycle includes an isochronous transmission area containing the information (specifically, the image information, the audio information, etc.) transmitted in synchronism with the information contained in other isochronous cycles and an asynchronous transmission area containing the information (specifically, the control information for controlling the output, etc. of the image information or the audio information) transmitted asynchronously without regard to other information. The information existing in the isochronous transmission area is divided by time for each different channel so that different information is transmitted for each channel.
According to the aforementioned serial bus standard, the control information is transmitted at high speed from an information processing apparatus such as a personal computer. In this way, the electric home appliances and audio/visual devices such as an information reproducing apparatus can be centrally controlled. At the same time, the audio information or the like can be accurately transmitted between the nodes.
With the conventional nodes connected according to the serial bus standard described above, however, even when the audio information or the like is transmitted or the process for the transmission is actually executed with other nodes, the fact that the particular process is being executed is not indicated to the user.
In this case, the user of the node cannot recognize whether the audio information or the like is actually being transmitted or whether the node is in a position to transmit the audio information. Thus the problem is posed that even when the transmission of the audio information or the like becomes impossible or the desired music or the like cannot be heard for some reason or other, the user cannot recognize the cause thereof.
The unnecessary time is consumed to trace the cause of this problem, thereby leading to the problem that the user is driven into an extremely inconvenient situation.